Download I. Plantations in the West Indies A. Colonization Before 1650 1

I.
II.
Plantations in the West Indies
A. Colonization Before 1650
1. Spanish settlers introduced sugar-cane cultivation into the West Indies shortly after 1500
but did not do much else toward the further development of the islands. After 1600, the
French and English developed colonies based on tobacco cultivation.
2. Tobacco consumption became popular in England in the early 1600s. Tobacco
production in the West Indies was stimulated by two new developments: the formation of
chartered companies and the availability of cheap labor in the form of European
indentured servants.
3. In the mid-1600s, competition from milder Virginia tobacco and the expulsion of
experienced Dutch sugar producers from Brazil combined to bring the West Indian
economies from tobacco to sugar production.
4. The Portuguese had introduced sugar-cane cultivation to Brazil, and the Dutch West
India Company, chartered to bring the Dutch wars against Spain to the New World, had
taken control of a large portion of the Brazilian sugar-producing region. Over a fifteenyear period, the Dutch improved the efficiency of the Brazilian sugar industry and
brought slaves from Elmina and Luanda (also seized from Portugal) to Brazil and the
West Indies.
5. When Portugal reconquered Brazil in 1654, the Dutch sugar planters brought the
Brazilian system to the French and English Caribbean Islands.
B. Sugar and Slaves
1. Between 1640 and the 1680s, colonies like Guadeloupe, Martinique, and particularly
Barbados made the transition from a tobacco economy to a sugar economy. In the
process of doing so, their demand for labor caused a sharp and significant increase in the
volume of the Atlantic slave trade.
2. The shift from European indentured servants to enslaved African labor was caused by a
number of factors, including a decline in the number of Europeans willing to indenture
themselves to the West Indies and a rise in sugar prices that made planters more able to
invest in slaves.
Plantation Life in the Eighteenth Century
A. Technology and Environment
1. Sugar production had both an agricultural and an industrial character. Sugar plantations
both grew sugar cane and processed the cane into sugar crystals, molasses, and rum. The
technology for growing and harvesting cane was simple, but the machinery required for
processing (rollers, copper kettles, and so on) was more complicated and expensive. The
expenses of sugar production led planters to seek economies of scale by running large
plantations.
2. Sugar production damaged the environment by causing soil exhaustion and deforestation.
Repeated cultivation of sugar cane exhausted the soil of the plantations and led the
planters to open new fields, thus accelerating the deforestation that had begun under the
Spanish.
3. European colonization led to the introduction of European and African plants and
animals that crowded out indigenous species. Colonization also pushed the indigenous
peoples to extinction.
B. Slaves’ Lives
1. West Indian society, which was the most polarized society in the world in the eighteenth
century, consisted of a wealthy land-owning plantocracy, their many slaves, and a few
people in between.
2. A plantation had to extract as much labor as possible from its slaves to turn a profit.
Slaves were organized into “gangs” for fieldwork, while those male slaves not doing
fieldwork were engaged in specialized tasks.
3.
Slaves were rewarded for good work and punished harshly for failure to meet their
production quotas or for any form of resistance. On Sundays, slaves cultivated their own
food crops and did other chores; they had very little rest and relaxation, no education,
and little time or opportunity for family life.
4. Disease, harsh working conditions, and dangerous mill machinery all contributed to the
short life expectancy of slaves in the Caribbean. The high mortality rate added to the
volume of the Atlantic slave trade and meant that the majority of slaves on West Indian
plantations were born in Africa.
5. Slaves frequently ran away and occasionally staged violent rebellions such as that led by
a slave named Tacky in Jamaica in 1760. European planters sought to prevent rebellions
by curtailing African cultural traditions, religions, and languages.
C. Free Whites and Free Blacks
1. In Saint Domingue, there were three groups of free people: the wealthy great whites, the
less-well-off little whites, and the free blacks. In the British colonies, where sugar almost
completely dominated the economy, there were very few free small landholders, white or
black.
2. Only a very wealthy man could afford the capital to invest in the land, machinery, and
slaves needed to establish a sugar plantation. West Indian planters were very wealthy and
translated their wealth into political power, controlling the colonial assemblies and even
gaining a number of seats in the British Parliament.
3. Slave owners who fathered children by female slaves often gave both mother and child
their freedom; over time, this practice (manumission) produced a significant free black
population. The largest group of freed slaves in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese
colonies came from self-purchase. Another source for the free black population was
runaway slaves, known in the Caribbean as maroons.
III. Creating the Atlantic Economy
A. Capitalism and Mercantilism
1. The system of royal monopoly control of colonies and their trade as practiced by Spain
and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries proved to be inefficient and
expensive. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the two new institutions of
capitalism and mercantilism established the framework within which governmentprotected private enterprise participated in the Atlantic economy.
2. The mechanisms of early capitalism included banks, joint-stock companies, stock
exchanges, and insurance.
3. Mercantilism was the government-led promotion of private investment in overseas trade
and accumulation of capital in the form of precious metals. The instruments of
mercantilism included chartered companies, such as the Dutch West India Company and
the French Royal African Company, and the use of military force to pursue commercial
dominance.
4. The French and English eliminated Dutch competition from the Americas by defeating
the Dutch in a series of wars between 1652 and 1678. The French and the English then
revoked the monopoly privileges of their chartered companies but continued to use high
tariffs to prevent foreigners from gaining access to trade with their colonies. The Atlantic
became the major trading area for the British, the French, and the Portuguese in the
eighteenth century.
B. The Atlantic Circuit
1. The Atlantic Circuit was a clockwise network of trade routes going from Europe to
Africa, from Africa to the plantation colonies of the Americas (the Middle Passage), and
then from the colonies to Europe. If all went well, a ship would make a profit on each leg
of the circuit.
2.
The Atlantic Circuit was supplemented by a number of other trade routes: Europe to the
Indian Ocean; Europe to the West Indies; New England to the West Indies; and the
“Triangular Trade” among New England, Africa, and the West Indies.
3. As the Atlantic system developed, increased demand for sugar in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Europe was associated with an increase in the flow of slaves from
Africa to the New World.
4. The slave trade was a highly specialized business in which chartered companies (in the
seventeenth century) and then private traders (in the eighteenth century) purchased slaves
in Africa, packed them into specially designed or modified ships, and delivered them for
sale to the plantation colonies.
5. Disease, maltreatment, suicide, and psychological depression all contributed to the
average death rate of one out of every six slaves shipped on the Middle Passage. Disease
was the single most important cause of death, killing the European crew of the slave
ships at roughly the same rate as it killed the slaves themselves.
IV. Africa, the Atlantic, and Islam
A. The Gold Coast and the Slave Coast
1. European trade with Africa grew tremendously after 1650 as merchants sought to
purchase slaves and other goods. The growth in the slave trade was accompanied by
continued trade in other goods, but it did not lead to any significant European
colonization of Africa.
2. African merchants were discriminating about the types and the amounts of merchandise
that they demanded in return for slaves and other goods, and they raised the price of
slaves in response to increased demand. African governments on the Gold and Slave
Coasts were strong enough to make Europeans observe African trading customs, while
the Europeans, competing with each other for African trade, were unable to present a
strong, united bargaining position.
3. Exchange of slaves for firearms contributed to state formation in the Gold and Slave
Coasts. The kingdom of Dahomey used firearms acquired in the slave trade to expand its
territory, while the kingdoms of Oyo and Asante had interests both in the Atlantic trade
and in overland trade with their northern neighbors.
4. The African kings and merchants of the Gold and Slave Coasts obtained slaves from
among the prisoners of war captured in conflicts between African kingdoms. However it
is unclear if slave-taking was the motivation for these wars in the first place.
B. The Bight of Biafra and Angola
1. There were no sizeable states—and no large-scale wars—in the interior of the Bight of
Biafra. Those sold into slavery were debtors, convicted criminals or victims of
kidnapping. African traders who specialized in procuring people for the slave trade did
business at inland markets or fairs and brought the slaves to the coast for sale.
2. In the Portuguese-held territory of Angola, the largest source of slaves in the Atlantic
world, Afro-Portuguese caravan merchants brought trade goods to the interior and
exchanged them for slaves, whom they transported to the coast for sale to Portuguese
middlemen, who then sold the slaves to slave dealers for shipment to Brazil. Many of
these slaves were prisoners of war, a byproduct generated by the wars of territorial
expansion fought by the federation of Lunda kingdoms.
3. Enslavement has also been linked to environmental crises in the interior of Angola.
Droughts forced refugees to flee to kingdoms in better-watered areas, where the kings
traded the grown male refugees to slave dealers in exchange for textiles and other goods
that they then used to cement old alliances, attract new followers, and build a stronger,
larger state.
4. Although the organization of the Atlantic trade varied from place to place, it was always
based on a partnership between European traders and a few African political and
V.
merchant elites who benefited from the trade, while many more Africans suffered from
it.
C. Africa’s European and Islamic Contacts
1. In the centuries between 1550 and 1800, Europeans built a growing trade with Africa but
did not acquire very much African territory. The only significant European colonies were
those on islands; the Portuguese in Angola; and the Dutch Cape Colony, which was tied
to the Indian Ocean trade rather than to the Atlantic trade.
2. Muslim territorial dominance was much more significant, with the Ottoman Empire
controlling all of North Africa except Morocco and with Muslims taking large amounts
of territory from Ethiopia. In the 1580s, Morocco attacked the sub-Saharan Muslim
kingdom of Songhai, occupying the area for the next two centuries and causing the bulk
of the trans-Saharan trade to shift from the western Sudan to the central Sudan.
3. The trans-Saharan slave trade was smaller in volume than the Atlantic slave trade and
supplied slaves for the personal slave army of the Moroccan rulers as well as slaves for
sugar plantation labor, servants, and artisans. The majority of slaves transported across
the Sahara were women destined for service as concubines or servants and children,
including eunuchs, meant for service as harem guards.
4. Muslims had no moral objection to owning or trading in slaves, but religious law forbade
the enslavement of fellow Muslims. Even so, some Muslim states south of the Sahara did
enslave African Muslims.
5. Muslim cultural influences south of the Sahara were much stronger than European
cultural influences. Islam and the Arabic language spread more rapidly than Christianity
and English, which were largely confined to the coastal trading centers.
6. The European and Islamic slave trade could not have had a significant effect on the
overall population of the African continent, but they did have an acute effect on certain
areas from which large numbers of people were taken into slavery. The higher proportion
of women taken across the Sahara in the Muslim slave trade magnified its long-term
demographic effects.
7. The volume of trade goods imported into sub-Saharan Africa was not large enough to
have had any significant effect on the livelihood of traditional African artisans. Both
African and European merchants benefited from this trade, but Europeans directed the
Atlantic system and derived greater benefit from it than the African merchants did.
Conclusion
1. The Atlantic system, created by European merchants, investors and governments, became
a vital part of the global trading system. It linked together different parts of the Atlantic
world, and then connected this system as a whole to the rest of the world.
2. Sugar, as the most valuable commodity produced in this system, drove financial and
technological innovations, and was fundamental for the dramatic rise in the volume of the
slave trade.
3. Slave trading, both in the Atlantic and on the Trans-Saharan route, had a dramatic impact
on West Africa. In the case of the Atlantic trade, African rulers and powerful states were
able both to maintain themselves and increase their power through their role in the slave
trade.